O+ Ultra Quick Review : Eight Things I Love About It, Sample Camera Shots, Is It The Right Smartphone For You?

"Sir Mark, I watched a UAAP Senior Men's Basketball game at the Mall of Asia Arena last Saturday and I noticed that O+ USA is advertising a new smartphone on the electronic billboard at the venue. What's that phone, sir? It looks nice," one of my readers messaged me on Facebook earlier.

Well, it's this Android handset. It's called O+ Ultra and we've featured it here in TechPinas before. This is the company's 2015 best-selling midrange model having several unique features that make it perfect for students and young professionals.

There are eight things about O+ Ultra that I particularly like -- and I'm sure that you will too. Let's go through them one by one.

1. Extra-Large Display - O+ Ultra sports a massive 5.5-inch HD IPS display panel that puts it well within phablet category. This big screen doesn't only let the user have a more enjoy content - like movies, photos, e-books, and websites - better but also lets you thumb-type faster on the device.

2. Extra-Large Battery - One of the biggest points for improvement of Android smartphones - from the very beginning - is short uptime. And what's great about O+ Ultra is that, unlike most of its competitors in its price category, it doesn't suffer from that issue -- thanks to its big 4,000 mAh capacity battery pack. That's two times the size of what's on other sub Php 10,000 handsets these days -- and it guarantees at least two days of uptime with regular use. If you leave your house with your O+ Ultra on a full charge, you won't have to plug it in your office at lunchtime just to make sure that it will still have power on your way home in the evening.

I have here some sample raw, unedited photos taken using automatic settings and without flash. I guess I'll just let the quality of the shots speak for itself. Kindly click on the photos for larger view:

4. Android Lollipop, Right Out Of The Box! Enjoy the benefits of the latest version of Android that's available to consumers on the O+ Ultra. Get a more secure mobile experience while navigating the neat and sleek Material Design interface.

5. Take Clear and Brilliant Selfies Anytime You Want - If - like me - you love to take selfies, then you'll surely fall in love with the O+ Ultra's 5 MegaPixel front-facing camera with Soft LED flash that lets you take self-portraits regardless of the lighting condition.

O+'s Selfie Fix innovation, which instantly enhances the quality of your selfies for instant sharing on Facebook or Instagram, already works well. But if you want to make the most of O+ Ultra's front cam, I would suggest that you use Youcam Perfect for even better looking photos.

6. Decent Gaming Performance - This midrange handset is powered by a 1.3 GHz Quad Core ARM Cortex A7 cores and a Mali-400 GPU based MediaTek MT6582 chipset (complemented by 1GB of RAM for multitasking) that's certainly capable of running 3D graphics-intensive games that you can download from the Google Play Store. My favorite title right now is Marvel Contest of Champions and my O+ Ultra runs it flawlessly.

7. No-non-sense Design and Solid Construction - If there's anything I know for sure about O+ USA by now it is that the company makes well-crafted, durable smartphones. And the O+ Ultra is certainly no exception to that. This one's built like a tank. And if you don't like seeing unnecessary design accents or embellishments on your daily phone, you'll definitely find this phone - with its clean lines - very attractive.

8. O+ Innovations - O+ Ultra comes with all the cool and unique software features created by O+ USA to give consumers a more intuitive and enjoyable mobile experience. There's the popular Air Shuffle that lets you take photos and jump from one music to the next simply by waving your hand in front of the phone's proximity sensor. And my favorite currently is Doodle Control that allows the user to launch applications just by drawing letters on the display in sleep mode, without having to turn it on.

Drawing "C" launches the Camera. It's really handy when you need to quickly shoot a photo of a moving subject using your smartphone.

Bonus! From shipping with a total 16GB of storage space (8GB of ROM + 8 GB Sandisk microSD card) when it was launched last June 2015, O+ Ultra now comes with 24GB Bigger Memory (8GB of ROM + Free 16 GB SanDisk microSD card)! That's more room for your photos and videos for free as the handset still has the same official suggested retail price of Php 7,395!

Is O+ Ultra the ideal handset for you? I recommend this smartphone as a cool upgrade for budget-conscious Android fans who are sick and tired of always having to charge their entry-level handset come lunch time or to carry a powerbank in their bags or pocket everyday. It's also for those who are on the look out for a fairly affordable phablet with a big screen and a good pair of cameras.